As a pastor, I have noticed that after someone experiences a moment of conversion or a “mountain-top” religious experience, they are eager to share their story. And because I am a pastor, I am a “safe” person to share these stories and experiences with. These experiences are typically shared after returning from a mission trip, spiritual retreat, or even a spirit-filled Sunday service.
“Pastor, you will never believe what happened. It was in the middle of the day; we had just sat down for lunch, and after we prayed, something happened.”
“What happened?”
“I don't know what happened, but I know something happened.”
“Well then. It sounds like something happened for sure. Were you expecting something to happen? Were you looking for or expecting God to do something?”
A moment of conversion or experience of something happening, namely God moving in our lives, causes us to need to share this experience with others—pastors, mentors, family, and friends. Yet, as we discern how we shall respond to what happened to us, the influence of modernity presses upon us, convincing us that while something may have happened, that something can be explained away.
“Yes, something happened,” says Modernity. “But was that something actually God? Or was that something, a projection of something deep down you wanted to happen?”
Think of a toddler with a favorite blanket or stuffed animal. When they feel scared, the child will cling to the blanket or stuffed animal and almost immediately feel better. Why is that? It's not the fabric or caricature of a llama they're holding. That item symbolizes the comforting presence of a parent in the child's mind. Holding the item brings them closer to their parent. Their parent is really there. This is not a falsehood or flaw but instead a projection. There's a genuine connection between the child's sense of security and the parent providing that security.
To be human is to create images to make sense of the world, and even while these images can be limited or imperfect, they are still tethered to reality. Sigmund Freud mapped out the human psyche using terms like ego, superego, and libido, using his own set of projections. Freud labeled these terms as sick as a way to diminish religion.
After all, we cannot live without some form of illusion. As children, we play with toys and games. As adults, we engage with ideas and images. This is how we make sense of an often overwhelming world around us.
Science works partly because it is a successful projection, a way of theorizing about the world that helps us navigate it. Through tests, science confirms theories; even if those theories are not fully proven, something is learned. Think back to your 5th-grade science fair project. You may not have proven your thesis; you may have disproven it, but you still learned something.
Illusions are not faults or lies. They are drawn from the depth of our human experience, helping us organize and better understand it. Those who create theories about the world may think they are helping to explain away something that happened to us when, in fact, they just might be helping us better understand the something that God did.
What I'm getting at is that religion is a way of thinking. Some will say religion demands the sacrifice of intellect, but that just is not true. Being a religious person involves engaging in intellect. And our faith in Jesus Christ does not stifle thought. Instead, a new way of thinking and living is sparked. Instead of viewing our tendency to project images onto the world as childish or sick, we see it as a natural part of making sense of what is happening around us. It is how we make sense of what God is doing throughout creation.
Which brings us to our Gospel reading.
Jesus said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.”[i]
Notice what Jesus said. He came down from heaven. Christ comes to us. The bread of life is not a metaphor or remembrance of the gospel but the gospel itself. God coming to us. Or, as the late theologian Eugene Peterson put it, “The Word of God took on flesh and moved into the neighborhood.”[ii]
What we experience in encountering our living God is not something we conjure up on our own. The experiences we have, the somethings that happen, are a gift of God's grace. It is a gift from outside our limited understanding of the world. Theologian Frederick Bruner wrote that Christ “gives us meaning to life, focuses, centers, reorients.”
Next Sunday, we will read that the disciples said, “Jesus’s teachings are ‘difficult.'[iii] And because the teachings are difficult, who can accept them?” This question is still considered by many today.
Jesus will tell them, “I told you I came down from heaven. I know it is a challenge to understand. This will stretch your understanding.”
Jesus offers us something that is beyond our reach and beyond our understanding. He is offering us the very life of God, revealing a God we could not imagine on our own. He comes to us before we seek Him, before we project God upon the world, and even as we attempt to explain him away.
There is a living God who speaks and acts even while our modern world is full of ways to attempt to shut God out. God breaks through to us in God's mercy, as a means of grace. This is when the something happens.
You may feel jolted, but that's OK. It is OK to find the moment when something happens unsettling and to ask, “What am I supposed to do with this bread from heaven? Eat my flesh and live. What does this mean?”
Rather than dismissing or explaining away, recognize this as a gift—God's grace for you.
Many Christians are drawn to author C.S. Lewis because, like Lewis, we are struck by how much bigger and more exciting and, yes, even weirder, God is than anything we could come up with on our own. For Lewis, the reality of God was confirmed by God's otherness. Because of God's strangeness, perhaps Lewis was a fan of the 6th chapter of John. Lewis wrote, “Nothing which at all times is agreeable to us has any objective reality. It is the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, and that it should insist on being itself and not your dream furniture. Dream furniture is the only kind of furniture on which you'd never stub your toe or bang your knee.”
Amen.
[i] John 6:51
[ii] John 1:14, The Message
[iii] John 6:60
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